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Moonlite NiteCrawler Rotator PA Issue
I've been having trouble getting the mechanical angles of my Moonlite NiteCrawler rotator/focuser to match up with the PA in ACP.
The first thing I did was manually slew the rotator to 0 degrees. I took an image using MaxIm, analyzed it with Pinpoint and got an offset of about -4.5 degrees. Not great, but this alignment corresponded with my visual inspection.
So this evening I tried using Scheduler to run dusk flats and the rotator was immediately told to rotate to the mechanical angle 254. Obviously nowhere near a PA=0 or PA=180. i'm not sure where that number came from. I tried using the calibrateguider and centerscope scripts to get the PA in ACP to match the 4.5 degree offset but the results were all over the board.
I went ahead and set up a plan in Planner to take an image series. I manually rotated to mechanical=0 and then started the plan. The first thing that happened was the rotator was told to rotate to 71.2 degrees. As FocusMax went through its routine I noted that the rotated angle of the plate solve was 66.7 degrees (71.2-4.5=66.7). After FocusMax completed its focus run ACP took a pointing image and saw that there was a 71.1 degree rotator error. The rotator was told to move to 142.3 degrees. Not sure what is going on. I've attached the log of the Plan run.
I do know the NiteCrawler is set up to move to a position in either direction using the shortest path. My limits are set at +190 and -190 in order to avoid cord wrap.
Suggestions welcome.
Moonlite NiteCrawler Rotator PA Issue
Having analyzed your log and reported in detail, and responded to your other post about the meaning of PA and which side of the meridian the target is on, I don’t know what more to say at this point, so let’s set up a phone conversation for next week when we’re back in the office. No worries, I’m not going to give up on this.
PS the normal logic of ACP does the rotate-measure-correct for every target, and saves the offset for the next target. No separate script needed.